NYPD infiltration of colleges raises privacy fears

On a recent afternoon, society members made their way past students playing board games in the lounge. Hip-hop music by Flo Rida and T-Pain blared from the office of another student club.

The Muslim students entered the prayer room for men, knelt on a patch of carpet and recited quietly, occasionally touching their heads to the floor in unison.

A bumper sticker on the door of the women’s room read: “Discover Jesus in the Quran.” A table held tracts with titles like “Women’s Dress in Islam” and “Samples from the Illustrious Qur’an.” A bulletin board offered free Arabic classes.

Nazim Hussain, 21, a senior accounting major, said the club offers a quiet place to worship on the busy campus, as well as a social outlet.

“It’s just a brotherhood, nothing extreme, nothing like that,” he said. “We just do football, basketball, stuff like that.”

The documents show police were interested in guest speakers and any signs of Salafism, a strain of fundamentalist Islam.

The groups at Baruch and Brooklyn College’s featured “regular Salafi speakers” and the one at City College had a “Salafi website,” the documents said.

“Students are politically active and are radicalizing,” agents said of the Baruch Muslim Student Association. The group declined to make immediate comment.

Mohammad Shamsi Ali, an associate cleric at the Islamic Center of New York, said some student groups have been known to invite speakers to campus without vetting them first.

“Some MSA groups in some colleges are being influenced by Salafi tendencies because many of these students, they don’t know who the speakers are,” Shamsi Ali said. “They invite them to speak in the college, and they influence them. They influence the minds of the students.”

Police believed that the group at Queens College had a link to a member of Al-Muhajiroun, a Muslim organization that was banned in Saudi Arabia and Britain for condoning militant attacks.

In a few instances, NYPD detectives approached campus police for help, saying they were working narcotics or gang cases to win their cooperation and sometimes even access to records, the official said. Police used the records to identify students they were observing and get contact information, the official said.

The colleges may have broken the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal statute, if they handed over student records without the students’ consent, said Richard Rainsberger, a consultant on college privacy laws.

The punishment for such disclosures is severe: a school can lose all of its federal funding.

“That means every single federal dollar: the research funds, the federal loans, the Pell grants,” said Meg Penrose, an expert on the privacy act at Texas Wesleyan University School of Law.

U.S. Education Department spokesman David Thomas said the agency had not heard about the NYPD program. But he said colleges are generally barred from giving law enforcement agencies any student records without their consent unless police have a court order or subpoena.

Sometimes, school police even let the NYPD use campus buildings as a quiet, out-of-the-way place to interview informants after hours, the law enforcement official said.

By 2006 police had placed NYPD undercover agents at Brooklyn College and Baruch, according to the documents obtained by the AP. At Hunter, City College, Queens College, La Guardia and St. John’s, documents said there were “secondary” undercover officers. It was not clear from the documents if that meant the NYPD was relying on another agency’s undercover officers or if the NYPD was one of two agencies infiltrating the groups.